RUSH: Preparations are underway to restore James Island. Once a thriving community on the Eastern Shore that succumbed to the waves of the Chesapeake Bay, but the people aren't coming back. Instead, a restored nature preserve will take form using dredge material from the Port of Baltimore. Delmarva Public Media's Kevin Diaz has this look.
DIAZ: James Island was once home to about 20 families, a school, a store, and a Methodist church. Yet by 1910, all but seven residents had moved to the mainland and soon after that, as erosion from the Chesapeake Bay took its toll, James Island was gone... if not forgotten.
BRADSHAW: My ancestors would've been the Pattisons that lived there. It had churches, it had schools. There's graveyards there that have washed overboard.
DIAZ: That's Dorchester County Historical Society President Tom Bradshaw, a descendant of a James Island family.
BRADSHAW: Yeah. Like many of the other islands up and down the bay, they supplied timber to the markets in Baltimore. It was just a thriving community, much like Taylor's Island of today.
DIAZ: Taylor's Island also faces a threat of erosion. But a restored James Island could act as a barrier protecting the shore from the rising sea levels or waves.
BRADSHAW: Well, here's the misnomer. Sea level rise. The water did rise, but the fact of the matter is mother nature kept chopping away through storms, winds, and waves at the shorelines of these islands, and they just eroded away.
DIAZ: Using drudge spoils from the Port of Baltimore, James Island is slated to rise again out of the bay, bringing back about 2000 acres of wetlands and upland habitat. But a new US Army Corps engineers contract is only the start of a process that could span decades. It also covers nearby Barren Island, also underwater.
NEWCOMB: I don't know who the last ones were, lived there. I mean, Barren Island was the same way. They had a lot of 'em, then they finally had to move to the mainland.
DIAZ: That's former Dorchester County Council President Jay Newcomb, once the owner of Old Salty's. He's now the owner of Boats and Hose, a new restaurant on Taylor's Island.
NEWCOMB: I talked to [?], he said he lived on Barren Island. So it was active little community years and years ago. But yep, it just kept washing away. Washing away. So the last thing on Barren Island was a hot lodge. They had his hot lodge and they had finally washed over.
DIAZ:The resident stories are now lost to history.
NEWCOMB: It's been so long. Most of them have all passed away now.
DIAZ: The project was first envisioned in the late 1990s. Bruce Colson, who owns the campground facing the Bay, was one of the early organizers.
COLSON: It will help Taylor's Island quite a bit. It will stop shore erosion on the north end of the island. Not as bad as it is now. It's just going down terrible out on Taylor's Island.
DIAZ: Colson says, the project will also protect the oyster beds in the Little Choptank river, which is always silting over.
COLSON: You got channels going through the Little Choptank, okay? But it's a silt coming in from the bay that just covers up the oyster, something terrible, and then the silt kills the oysters.
DIAZ: Finally, there's the Baltimore shipping channels that always need a place to deposit dredge spoil. Poplar Island off Talbot County was the first eroded Bay Island to be restored with dredged material.
COLSON: I mean, there's no place left to put dredge material in this quantity, and they can restore an island about like Poplar, and it's going to be another great success story.
DIAZ: The federal government will cover two thirds of the costs, with the Maryland Port Authority picking up the rest. All coming soon to an island near you. For Delmarva Public Media, this is Kevin Diaz.
